Bay Area criminal justice reformer wins MacArthur...

1of 4Raj Jayadev, at his desk inside the De-Bug office in San Jose in 2007. Jayadev, De-Bug’s 43-year-old co-founder, was among 25 people chosen Thursday as 2018 MacArthur Fellows, an annual award given to people who have shown extraordinary creativity and are deemed likely to continue to make important contributions to society. De-Bug is a Silicon Valley nonprofit that helps low-income families defend loved ones against criminal charges and navigate the justice system.Photo: JOHN LEE / SFC

2of 4Raj Jayadev helped start Silicon Valley De-Bug in 2001 and has been recognized for the group’s criminal justice reform work.Photo: Peter DaSilva / Special to the Chronicle 2017

3of 4Raj Jayadev, co-founder of Silicon Valley DeBug, a criminal justice reform group that supports ending cash bail, urged lawmakers on Monday to vote against a bill that would do just that. SB10 is deeply flawed, Jayadev said.Photo: Melody Gutierrez / SFC

4of 4Raj Jayadev, Nanji Jayadev and Charisse Domingo are seen at the reception of The Chronicle’s Visionary Of The Year Awards Gala at the San Francisco War Memorial on March 30, 2017. Jayadev, 43-year-old co-founder of De-Bug, a Silicon Valley nonprofit that helps low-income families defend loved ones against criminal charges and navigate the justice system, was among 25 people chosen Thursday as 2018 MacArthur Fellows. The annual “genius” award is given to people who have shown extraordinary creativity and are deemed likely to continue to make important contributions to society.Photo: Susana Bates / Special to The Chronicle

A Bay Area community organizer who started a Silicon Valley nonprofit that helps low-income families defend loved ones against criminal charges and navigate the justice system has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.

Sarah Stewart, a planetary scientist at UC Davis, was also awarded a grant for her work explaining how celestial collisions create planets and satellites, like the Earth and its moon.

The $625,000 genius grants are given each year to innovators, artists, writers and social justice advocates across the country who have made a difference through their creative vision.

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Other 2018 MacArthur Fellowship Winners

Matthew Aucoin, a composer and conductor with the American Modern Opera Company, for expanding the potential of vocal and orchestral music to convey emotional, dramatic and literary meaning.

Julie Ault, a New York artist and curator, for redefining the role of artwork and the artist by melding artistic, curatorial, archival, editorial and activist practices into a new form of cultural production.

William J. Barber II, a Goldsboro, N.C., pastor and social justice advocate, for building broad-based coalitions as part of a movement to confront racial and economic inequality.

Clifford Brangwynne, a biophysics engineer at Princeton University, for using the principles of soft matter physics and cell biology to illuminate novel mechanisms of cellular compartmentalization that drive biological development.

Natalie Diaz, an Arizona State University poet, for drawing on her experience as a Mojave American Indian and Latina to challenge the mythological and cultural touchstones underlying American society.

Livia S. Eberlin, an analytical chemist at the University of Texas at Austin, for developing mass spectrometry-based methods to differentiate more quickly and accurately between diseased and healthy tissues during surgery.

Deborah Estrin, a computer scientist at Cornell Tech, in New York, for designing open-source platforms that leverage mobile devices and data to address sociotechnological challenges such as personal health management.

Amy Finkelstein, a health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for formulating robust empirical methods to illuminate the hidden complexities of health-care policy and provide data-driven guidance for future innovations in theory and practice.

Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at Yale University, for his work combining human rights and public health to address inequities in global health.

Vijay Gupta, a violinist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, for providing musical enrichment to homeless, incarcerated and low-income communities in Los Angeles.

Becca Heller, a human rights lawyer at the International Refugee Assistance Project in New York, for mobilizing law schools and law firms to defend the rights of refugees and at-risk populations.

Titus Kaphar, a New Haven, Conn., painter, for using his works to highlight the lack of people of color in Western art.

John Keene, a writer at Rutgers University, for exploring the impact of historical narratives on contemporary lives and re-imagining the history of the Americas from the perspective of suppressed people.

Kelly Link, a fiction writer from Northampton, Mass., for pushing the boundaries of literary fiction by combining the surreal and fantastical with the concerns and emotional realism of contemporary life.

Dominique Morisseau, a playwright at Signature Theatre in New York, for examining the intersection of choice and circumstance in works that portray individuals and communities grappling with economic and social changes.

Okwui Okpokwasili, a New York choreographer and performer, for showing the interior lives of women and their stories of resistance and resilience.

Kristina Olson, a psychologist at the University of Washington for advancing the scientific understanding of gender and shedding light on the social and cognitive development of transgender and gender-nonconforming youth.

Lisa Parks, a media scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for exploring the global reach of information technology and the cultural, political and humanitarian implications of the flow of information.

Rebecca Sandefur, a sociologist and legal scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for promoting a new evidence-based approach to increasing access to civil justice for low-income communities.

Allan Sly, a Princeton University mathematician, for applying probability theory to resolve long-standing problems in statistical physics and computer science.

Wu Tsang, a New York filmmaker and performance artist, for creating conceptual and visual techniques that explore hidden histories and narratives that collapse the boundaries between documentary and fiction.

Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology for uncovering the fundamental neural principles that underlie the primate brain’s perception of the visual world.

Ken Ward, Jr., an investigative journalist with the Charleston Gazette-Mail, in Charleston, W. Va., for revealing the human and environmental toll of natural resource extraction in West Virginia and spurring greater accountability among public and private stakeholders.

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Jayadev, 43, of San Jose, won the prestigious grant for creating a system that helps families and local communities play an active role in the defense of relatives who are facing incarceration.

“This absolutely is recognition of a community journey,” said Jayadev, who was a nominee for the 2017 Visionary of the Year award, sponsored by The Chronicle. “It is a reflection of De-Bug’s philosophy ... (and) the families that have the strength to challenge police abuse or never say quit when a loved one has been wrongly convicted.”

Jayadev started De-Bug in 2001 as a magazine that told the stories of poor and minority tech workers whose voices are rarely heard. The San Jose nonprofit, named after Silicon Valley assembly line workers who would “debug” malfunctioning products, began focusing on criminal justice after the 2004 killing in San Jose of Rodolfo Cardenas, a construction worker who was shot in the back by a state narcotics agent who mistook him for a wanted fugitive.

De-Bug began cataloging the racially disproportionate number of arrests in San Jose and pressured city leaders to change police practices. It has since evolved into a grassroots criminal justice reform movement that is spreading across the country.

Jayadev has been credited with helping broker reforms in the county’s bail system so that nonviolent offenders can avoid financial ruin while awaiting trial. He uses a “participatory defense” model that tries to harvest the collective power of the larger community to support defendants charged with a crime, even if it’s just to give the court a fuller story about their lives and loved ones.

“The methodology was developed over nine or 10 years as a response to people who came to us saying, ‘Our loved one is facing prosecution. What can we do?’” he said. “De-Bug uses the cumulative intelligence in the room to problem solve, innovate and work so that people facing incarceration don’t have to walk alone.”

Peter Fimrite is The Chronicle’s lead science reporter, covering scientific research, the environment and the cosmos. His beat includes earthquake research, marine biology, wildfire science and space exploration. He also writes about the cannabis industry, outdoor adventure, Native American issues and the culture of the West. A former U.S. Forest Service firefighter, he has traveled extensively and covered a wide variety of issues during his career, including the Beijing Olympics, Hurricane Katrina, illegal American tourism in Cuba and a 40-day cross country car trip commemorating the history of automobile travel in America.